“The woman was his wife,” he finished, “pregnant in the initial vision, which was overlaid onto my view of the workshop, but not in the more involved and vivid second, which took me to a period before they were married, and in which I was so utterly immersed that I thought myself him. My—that is to say, Oxford’s—love for her was exceedingly strong.”
He stopped and swallowed as an ache squeezed at his heart. He wanted to see Isabel. It was a torture to know that in some other versions of this world, she still lived.
Why can I not be one of those other Burtons? One of the more fortunate ones?
He went on, “But there was no trace of lunacy in the memory, so I wonder whether it came from the functioning helmet rather than from the imprint in the Field Preserver.”
“You’re probably correct,” Babbage said. “The confounded headpiece erased all the data from my device, injected the diamond dust into you, and immediately ceased to function. We have nothing of Edward Oxford remaining except for what’s in your scalp, and that won’t last for long.”
“The tattoo will come out?”
“No, it’s too deep. What I mean to say is that the traces of Oxford inside it will soon be overwritten. Being in such proximity to your brain, the dust is within its electrical field. Your thoughts will quickly expunge the knowledge they contain. It’s a tragedy. Genius is being replaced by the prosaic.”
“Charmed, I’m sure,” Burton muttered.
Swinburne said, “It appears that every time you conduct an experiment, Charles, we lose something.”
Babbage bared his teeth.
Gooch made an observation. “For the second time, an intelligence to which we attribute no sentience has acted independently. There has to be interference. A meddler.”
“No. I don’t believe so,” Burton said. He looked at Babbage. “Prior to the damaged suit’s disappearance, you stated that if it had been the only one in our possession—if Abdu El Yezdi had never given you a pristine version—you would have transferred power from its Nimtz generator to its helmet, hoping to instigate self-repair mode.”
Babbage put his fingertips to his chin and tapped it. “I did say that, yes. It would have been the obvious course of action.”
“Well, what if all your counterparts in all the alternate histories—none of whom had a functional suit—did exactly that, all at precisely the same moment, nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1860?”
The old man gazed at Burton, his mind obviously racing. His left eyebrow twitched upward. His mouth fell open. He put his hands together and rubbed them. “There—there—there would be the possibility that—that—by God!—that through means of resonance, the insane fragments of Edward Oxford’s consciousness would—would link together across the parallel realities.”
“And in consequence?”
Babbage suddenly clapped his hands and yelled, “By the Lord Harry! Active pathways!” He hugged himself and started to pace up and down at the foot of Burton’s bed, his eyes focused inward.
“Active pathways,” Swinburne said. “Oh, how you mingle incompatible words, Babbage. What are active pathways?”
Babbage answered as if addressing himself rather than the poet. “A thought is a burst of subtle electrical energy that flows through the brain, following paths between the cells. Every notion creates new routes. The damaged helmet couldn’t function because only one route was imprinted into the diamond dust—Spring Heeled Jack’s final thought. It is a static conceptual matrix, the frozen obsession of a dying madman. However—”
He stopped, frowned, placed his fingertips to his head and tapped away.
They waited.
“However. However. However. If a resonation spanned the different realities, then a potentially infinite number of—of—”
He stumbled to a halt again.
“I think I understand,” Daniel Gooch murmured. He turned to Burton. “Consider it three-dimensionally. From above, you could look down and see a single path following one particular route. From ground level, though, you might see that it is actually countless paths laid one atop the other, opening up countless new avenues on the vertical.”
“Enabling the synthetic intelligence to become conscious?” Burton asked.
“Trans-historically,” Gooch confirmed.
“You just made that word up!” Swinburne protested.
“I mean it to suggest the notion that the intelligence, which lacked the capacity for independent action in any single history, might have gained it by extending itself across every iteration of reality.”
Babbage whispered, “Sentient. But still insane!”
“So no one caused the damaged suit to vanish,” Gooch mused. “It did it all by itself. But where did it go?”
Burton said, “Back to where—or rather, to when—it originally came from. The year 2202.”
“You gleaned all this from the functioning helmet?” Swinburne asked. “Is it alive, too?”
Gooch answered, “Was, in a manner of speaking. Not now. Inevitably, it must have also been influenced by the resonance. Whatever intelligence has been formed by the multiple iterations of the suit, the sole undamaged helmet was probably the only sane element of it.” He narrowed his eyes at the king’s agent. “Now it appears to be a part of you. Intriguing!”
Babbage stopped pacing and peered at Burton. “Whence this theory? I demand to know!”
The king’s agent climbed out of the bed and crossed to where his clothes were folded upon a chair. He started to dress. “I have witnessed your counterparts in other histories, Charles. In all of them, he did exactly what you’ve stated you would do. I watched him connect the damaged suit’s helmet to the Nimtz generator and in every case the suit vanished.”
“You witnessed?” Gooch interjected. “Did you visit a medium?”
“No, Daniel. My mind was projected into my other selves.”
“By what means?”
“Through the influence of a medical tonic called Saltzmann’s Tincture.”
“Ridiculous!” Babbage barked. “A magical potion? Pure fantasy! And if it were true, it would imply that someone brewed the concoction specifically so you’d be warned of the advent of this new intelligence. Who? How is it possible?”
Burton buttoned his shirt. “The identity of our ally remains a mystery. It’s one I intend to solve.”
Accompanied by Swinburne, the king’s agent took a cab home. The sky was clear and the day’s cold had a sharp bite. In the hansom’s cabin, they shivered and their breath clouded from their nostrils.
While his friend waited in the vehicle, Burton entered number 14 and, two minutes later, emerged with Fidget.
“Is the beast really necessary?” Swinburne huffed, folding his legs up onto the seat as Burton climbed in. “Haven’t I suffered enough?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Burton said, “but you haven’t been beaten black and blue, rendered unconscious, and tattooed against your will.”
“Nevertheless, I value my ankles. They’re a vital part of me. They keep my feet attached to my legs.”
Burton bumped his cane against the roof of the cabin. The hansom jolted into motion.
“I say, Richard, are we caught up in a feud between two Edward Oxfords, one demented and the other with his marbles intact?”
“I posit but a single Oxford consciousness. One that betrayed itself when its single fragment of sanity indicated to me where the rest had fled.”
“That’s how you interpret what you saw?”
“With regard to the initial vision of Oxford’s pregnant wife, certainly. The longing for her was overwhelming.”
“So he’s jumped back to 2202 to find her,” Swinburne mused.
“The tragedy of it being that he won’t arrive in the 2202 from which he came, for it no longer exists. He wiped it out of existence when he changed the past. That, I believe, is what the second part of the vision was attempting to show me.”